GLASS IN LATE ANTIQUITY: THE CONTINUITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND SOURCES OF SUPPLY

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Saguí

Scientific research and a series of important archaeological discoveries in recent years have opened up new perspectives on the study of ancient glass. Glass production seems to have been organised on a hierarchical basis. The primary workshops, mainly concentrated on the Syro-Palestinian coast, prepared the raw material by fusing sand from the river Belus with natron from Egypt. The product was then sent in blocks to all secondary workshops, the organisation of which was less elaborate. Here work was limited to re-fusing material that had already been worked. The widespread commercial movement of raw glass from East to West seems to have only come to a halt in the 9th c., when the export of natron from Egypt stopped. Consequently, a different flux was used, which was incompatible with the oriental sand. The adoption of local raw materials in the place of natron meant that the management of the entire production cycle became gradually autonomous, at different speeds and in different ways, during the course of the Middle Ages.

Minerals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 1001
Author(s):  
Zuzana Zlámalová Cílová ◽  
Michal Gelnar ◽  
Simona Randáková

The study deals with the development of the chemical composition of blue glass from the 13th to the 19th century in the region of Bohemia (Central Europe). Nearly 100 glass samples (colourless, greenish, and blue) were evaluated by an XRF method to distinguish the colouring components of blue glass. As early as in the 13th century, blue glass based on ash containing colouring ions of Co and Cu was produced here. To achieve the blue colour of glass, a copper-rich raw material was most likely applied. This information significantly complements the existing knowledge about glass colouring in the Middle Ages, as the glass of later periods was typically coloured with raw materials containing cobalt.


Gesta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
Armin F. Bergmeier

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 24-37
Author(s):  
Elena E. Voytishek

The article provides an overview of the main stages and trends in the development of the incense culture of China from antiquity to the present day. It covers religious and magical rituals, sanitary and hygiene, traditional medicine, a set of spiritual, healing, artistic, and game practices and rituals of Taoist-Buddhist and Confucian character. In China, over several millennia, a colossal experience has been accumulated in terms of the use of aromatic raw materials of plant, mineral and animal origin: thousands of treatises and reference books have been written, the properties of individual incense and their combinations have been studied, detailed classifications have been drawn up and principles of religious cults and ritual practices have been developed. Along with the applied value of incense, an aesthetic attitude toward incense aromas also developed, which repeatedly ensured periods of rapid flourishing of incense culture in antiquity, the Middle Ages and on the cusp of the New Age. Currently, the traditional aromatic culture in China is experiencing a period of upsurge and revival. This provides ample opportunities for its study in various fields of knowledge, which indicates the relevance and multidimensional nature of the study of this topic.


1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Derek Baker

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.


Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.


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